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By Nik Varley Nov. 25, 2016 Don\u2019t get me wrong, I love Thanksgiving.\u00a0 I love getting a break from classes, eating loads of food and spending time with my old friends.\u00a0 However, more than any of these things, my absolute favorite part of the holiday is the chance to sit down with my family and appreciate the things that we\u2019re most thankful for; it\u2019s a great opportunity to reflect on all the good in our lives.\u00a0 Something was different this year, though.\u00a0 Something was wrong.\u00a0 When my dad got up to give the Thanksgiving toast, in addition to saying how thankful he was for our family and the food on the table, he finished his toast with, \u201cbut most of all, I\u2019m thankful for Academy Award nominee Greg Kinnear.\u201d I laughed, thinking that my dad had made a joke, but as I looked around at my family members nodding soberly, I realized that this was no laughing matter.\u00a0 Little did I know, this was not the last I was going to hear of Screen Actor\u2019s Guild Award winner Greg Kinnear that night.\u00a0 As we went around the table and shared what we were thankful for, his name appeared again and again; my mom referred to him as a \u201cnational treasure\u201d while my grandfather called his performance in Baby Mama \u201cthe finest piece of acting I\u2019ve seen in my 84 years on Earth.\u201d\u00a0 My aunt was the most emotional of all, tearfully stating that she was \u201covercome with thankfulness for the love and support of her family, and also for Greg Kinnear\u2019s standout performance in 2012\u2019s Stuck in Love, which gave [her] the strength to carry on through [her] ongoing battle with colitis.\u201d\u00a0 When my cousin loudly exclaimed that \u201call we need in this life is love, family, and a healthy appreciation for the filmography of Daytime Emmy Award Winning actor and former game show host Greg Kinnear,\u201d I had the only dry eyes in the room.\u00a0 It was disorienting to say the least.\u00a0 Don\u2019t get me wrong, I have nothing against Mr. Kinnear or his work.\u00a0 As Good as it Gets is a classic, and I like Little Miss Sunshine just as much as the next guy.\u00a0 In fact, I even enjoyed seeing him alongside Miley Cyrus in Julie Anne Robinson\u2019s The Last Song in a guilty pleasure sort of way.\u00a0 However, and again I mean no disrespect, why my family chose to consistently express their thankfulness for Greg Kinnear is a complete mystery to me.\u00a0 In fact, why they appear to love Mr. Kinnear with the same intensity that they love the food that they eat and the air that they breathe is basically beyond my comprehension, but I suppose that you have to take your loved ones as they are.\u00a0 No family is perfect, and every family has their issues; I guess that mine\u2019s is that everybody is really, really into Blockbuster Entertainment Award nominee Gregory Buck Kinnear.\u00a0 This is a reality that I\u2019m going to have to come to terms with.\u00a0 As I write this, my family is still sloppily yet emphatically toasting Kinnear, and they show no signs of slowing down.\u00a0\u00a0 While I may not understand this newfound appreciation of Greg Kinnear, I suppose that there are worse things than hearing my loved ones quote their favorite lines from You\u2019ve Got Mail when I ask them what they are most grateful for in the world.\u00a0 It sure is strange, but I love them anyways. That being said, you should have seen the dirty looks I got when I said that I was thankful for \u201cmy family, my security and the enduring works of Richard Dreyfuss.\u201d\u00a0 I guess there\u2019s no accounting for taste.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1713","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-komono"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/chicagoshadydealer.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1713","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/chicagoshadydealer.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/chicagoshadydealer.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chicagoshadydealer.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chicagoshadydealer.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1713"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/chicagoshadydealer.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1713\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2746,"href":"https:\/\/chicagoshadydealer.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1713\/revisions\/2746"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/chicagoshadydealer.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1713"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chicagoshadydealer.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1713"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chicagoshadydealer.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1713"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}